ERNST MORITZ ARNDT
A more fiery soul than that of Ernst Moritz Arndt can surely never have
lived upon this earth. He must have been fully eighty years old at the
time when I knew him, but age seemed to count for nothing with him. His
eye was as bright, his voice as clear and ringing, his gait as quick and
elastic as had he still been in the prime of life, and the most
impassioned speech from youthful lips would have seemed tame and cold
beside the lava-flood of eloquence that poured forth inexhaustibly from
his kindly and expressive, although perfectly toothless mouth. The loss
of his teeth was indeed the only real sign of age Arndt bore on his
person, and it was apparently a matter of so little moment to him, that
I have often wondered since, whether our modern practice of repairing by
artificial means the ravages of time, be after all so unquestionable an
advantage as some would pretend. The mouth which nature alone has
moulded year by year seems to me to retain in any case much more
character and expression than that which has been fitted out and shaped
anew by the dentist’s skill. However that may be, it is certain that
Arndt at all events felt not in the least inconvenienced by the loss,
nor did it detract from our pleasure in listening to him.
It was during our stay in Bonn, whither we had migrated in order to be
near a celebrated doctor, that we saw the venerable poet so constantly.
Two years of my childhood were spent in the charming little University
town, in the hope that my younger brother, an invalid from his birth,
and my mother, whose health then gave much cause for anxiety, might both
of them derive great and lasting benefit from the treatment of the great
specialist. And if these hopes were doomed to disappointment,--and it
seemed indeed, as an old friend of our family afterwards remarked, as if
the very best efforts of medical skill must here for ever prove
unavailing,--there were on the other hand certain compensations
attendant on our stay, in the shape of the opportunities for intercourse
it afforded with so many highly interesting people. And first and
foremost among these Arndt must be reckoned, as the most constant and
ever welcome guest. His visits were indeed of quite unconventional
length, for he would often stay for hours at a time, now reading aloud
to my mother one of her favourite Swedish books, now relating to us
children some thrilling episode of the War of Liberation, in which he
had played so conspicuous a part.
He was of such exuberant vivacity, that he talked till he literally
foamed at the mouth, and gesticulated wildly, sometimes enforcing what
he said by a little friendly tap on my mother’s shoulder, that made her
shrink,--for in her weak condition, the merest touch sufficed to bring
on one of her nervous attacks,--sometimes contenting himself with
pressing a heavy finger on my forehead, as I sat on his knee, and gazed
up in his face. I was all eyes and ears, drinking in his words with
that undivided attention that only children can give, and myself all on
fire with excitement. For he talked and talked, working himself up into
as burning a fever as if the French had still been in the land, and
Germany smarting under a foreign yoke, and poor Queen Louisa still
fretting her heart out for her country’s misfortunes! It was all so
real, so present for him! He lived back in those days once more, and
fought the old campaigns over again, and was for ever contriving some
new plan for his country’s salvation and welfare,--now inventing some
marvellous new weapon that should rid her of all her foes,--now devising
some infallible means of making her strong and united! For the dream of
German Unity never abandoned him, and there was nothing made him so wild
with indignation as for anyone to dare to assert that Germany was a mere
geographical expression.
Small wonder that we children listened with beating hearts and cheeks
aflame to the story of the stirring times, still so near to the elder
generation, members of our family too being yet alive, great-aunts and
great-uncles among us to that day, who had also lived through them, and
the very walls of our castle at Neuwied still bearing the marks of the
bullets, fired against it by the soldiers of General Hoche. But better
still, Arndt would often recite to us some of his own poems, both from
the earlier ones, written during the war, and from those of more recent
date, all of them glowing with the same patriotic fervour, and kindling
a like enthusiasm in the minds of his youthful hearers.
There were, however, fortunately other influences at work, to combat
what might have been a somewhat one-sided teaching, and prevent us from
believing that our old friend possessed a monopoly of patriotism. In the
first place, there was Monsieur Monnard, the very interesting French
professor at the university, whose refinement of speech and quiet manner
were in their way quite as effective and convincing as Arndt’s stormy
vehemence, and lent a peculiar charm to his conversation. To his
daughter too, a most charming creature, I owed a debt of gratitude for
one of the chief joys of my childhood, that delightful book “Augustin,”
in which she had told the story, as I afterwards heard, of her own child
whom she had lost. When I made her acquaintance, I had read her book a
hundred times, and almost knew it by heart! And besides these two, whose
love of their country was none the less intense, I felt, for being very
calmly expressed, there was another frequent guest in whom that
sentiment was evidently the ruling passion and guiding principle in
life. The last-mentioned, Demetrius Stourdza, was a slight, spare, very
dark young man, who had come from a far-off, and to me then quite
unknown country, to pursue his studies at the university, whilst his two
younger brothers followed the classes at the gymnasium or public school.
When he spoke of his home on the distant Moldau, of his oppressed,
unhappy country, it was in terms of the same ardent affection, the same
irrepressible emotion, as were Arndt’s in telling the story of Germany’s
wrongs; only the ills of which the young student had to tell dated much
further back and were so deeply rooted as to appear well nigh incurable.
Not only had his country groaned for centuries under foreign tyranny,
but she was also torn by internal feuds, split into two provinces,
Moldavia and Wallachia, constantly warring one with the other, so that
there seemed little prospect of national independence being attained. He
spoke with great enthusiasm of his mother-tongue, the beautiful
Roumanian language, common heritage of the two provinces, and I remember
how, at my mother’s request, he one day spoke a few words of Roumanian,
to let us hear the soft melodious sounds. Years after, on my first
arrival in Roumania, when the train drew up in the station at Bucarest,
the first person to step forward from the crowd waiting on the platform
to greet me, was Demetrius Stourdza, my old acquaintance in his student
days at Bonn, afterwards to be more than once Prime Minister. I
certainly, at the time I am speaking of, little foresaw this second
meeting, but what did strike me then was the strength and depth of this
stranger’s attachment to his country, perhaps all the stronger and
deeper for being coupled with such hopelessness. All these things made a
profound impression on my childish mind, and gave me much to reflect
upon. For even then I was already dreaming,--wild heedless creature as I
was generally supposed to be, and as I had come to consider myself. So
strong a hold had this belief taken of me, that nothing could well equal
my surprise, when some forty years later, meeting one of the companions
of these early days, and asking
[Illustration: ROYAL PALACE AT BUCAREST
Photo by Photochrome Co.]
her to tell me how I had appeared to her then, she replied without
hesitation,--“Most terribly serious!” For the moment I was perfectly
amazed; but, looking back once more on the past, and taking into account
the lively recollection I have retained, not merely of scenes and
events, but also of persons whom I met, and above all of the
conversations that went on around me from my eighth to my tenth year,
the conviction is forced upon me, that I must have brought to bear on
them very close attention, and an amount of discernment hardly
compatible with the character of careless high spirits with which I was
usually credited.
To return to Arndt: it was only natural that, whatever might arrest our
attention elsewhere, his personality remained the dominating one and was
invested for us with a sort of halo. Had he not himself taken part in
the deeds he told us of, and known and immortalised the heroes by whom
the best of these were accomplished,--in songs we knew by heart and sang
almost before we could speak plainly? At that time, I had never heard of
the tragedy which darkened his domestic life,--that he had known little
happiness in his own family, and had on one occasion treated one of his
sons with such harshness, that the young man went out and threw himself
into the Rhine, his body being afterwards sought for in vain for three
days and nights by the distracted parents. Of all this I knew nothing
then,--I saw in him only the patriot, the poet, the magician who could
work such marvels with words. It was a revelation to me, this of the
wondrous power of language, and of all the lessons I unconsciously
learned at that early age it was perhaps the one that I most readily and
thoroughly assimilated, being the most congenial to my own nature, and
corresponding to its potential needs. It is a pity that children are
generally so reserved and reticent, for a child of enquiring mind would
learn much more, could it but impart its own thoughts and enquire about
the things that puzzle it. But a sensitive child broods in silence over
its own imaginings, very often perplexed by some very simple matter
which a word might explain. And who indeed could have guessed that these
were the first stirrings of the poetic temperament within me, called
into life by the personality of the aged poet, towards whom I felt
myself irresistibly drawn? Poetry was certainly my native element. I
could already recite Schiller’s _Diver_ and the _Fight with the Dragon_,
and the other principal ballads; I learnt by heart with the greatest
facility, and to hear a short poem read over once was enough, I could
repeat it without a mistake. It was so much inflammable material, one
might say, collected within my brain, and awaiting but the approach of
the lighted match to ignite, and kindle to a blaze.
I wish I could remember some of Arndt’s own words to quote here. But of
that verbal brilliancy, that inexhaustible flow of speech, it is
necessarily the general impression that remains, rather than the exact
form in which it was cast, and I would not dare attempt to render this.
Some of his more humorous sayings, however, I have preserved textually,
and need therefore not hesitate to give the following specimen:--“When
I write to the King,” he one day explained,--“I do not trouble my head
with all that rubbish of humbly and dutifully, and most gracious this
and most gracious that, but simply say Your Majesty, and then plain you
and your, and afterwards perhaps just one more Majesty to wind up
with--for all the absurd rigmarole of Court lingo is more than I can
stand.”
To the very last Arndt was busy and eager, as I have said, for the cause
of German Unity, and we were all heart and soul with him in wishing well
to that cause. The year 1848 had not long gone past, with all its
unrest, and with the high hopes and dazzling day dreams it had brought,
and from one of those dreams we had hardly awakened yet,--that which we
dreamt as we saw folk going about wearing their black, red and yellow
cockades, as if by so doing they could bring all Germany under one flag
and place the Imperial crown on the head of the Prussian king. From the
balcony at Heidelberg my little four-year-old brother had helped to give
the word of command to the volunteers mustered in the square below, but
all that excitement had died out again, and things had drifted back into
the old well-worn grooves. The times were not yet ripe, and much water
would have to flow down the Rhine to the sea, ere that fair dream should
become reality. Clever and interesting as the Prussian king undoubtedly
was, it was not in his person that the traditions of the German Empire
were to be revived; that was to be the work of another, of whom at that
period no one thought,--the exile who was then looking down sadly and
wearily from his window upon a London street.
To conclude this brief sketch of Arndt, I can hardly do better than
transcribe the verses which about this time he wrote in my mother’s
album:
In God’s own image thou wast made;
Of Heaven’s pure light an emanation,
That down to this dark world has strayed.
’Tis this Heaven’s truest revelation.
Nor for thyself alone was lent
Yon ray that lights thy path thus kindly;
Each as the other’s guide was meant,
Here where all grope and struggle blindly.
Still to thy dream of Heaven hold fast!
For then, whatever ills assail thee,
Though every earthly joy fly past,
This one sure hope shall never fail thee!
_Bonn, 23. of the May-month, 1853._